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Drupal vs. Joomla – Two Great CMS Comparison of 2013

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We live in an age where ‘€˜Content is King’.€™ The success of most businesses depend on how well they are able to manage content. A good CMS enables its users to manage and update content on their websites with ease. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Umbraco, TextPattern, Contao, SilverStripe, and Cushy CMS are some of the most popular content management systems out there. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are the three of the most popular, free, PHP-based content management systems. This article takes a close look at Drupal and Joomla.

Among the wealth of open source CMS available, Drupal and Joomla stand as highly successful platforms. Both of them serve as great tools to power websites, offer free licensing, have thousands of extensions and modules, and provide excellent community support. But, both these platforms differ in several aspects.

In order to make the right choice, it is essential to understand the differences between these two CMS, and then choose the one that best serves one’€™s requirements. Explained below are five prominent differences between Drupal and Joomla. The comparison will help you to get a better idea about these two CMS, and will aid you in making the right choice.

User-friendliness

For any open source CMS, an important indicator of success is its user-friendliness. Both Drupal and Joomla are excellent tools for content creation, but the difference lies in their usability.

Difference: When it comes to content creation, Drupal’€™s editor contains many useful features including in-line editing where user can edit content on the front-end. This eliminates the need to go to admin area for every single error. But, Drupal’€™s editor has several sections and sub-sections. So, users have to spend some time to understand Drupal and deal with the technical things.

Joomla’s editor also provides the same convenience. But, in addition to the editing features, Joomla contains specific content type settings, which are available to the users as soon as it is installed, and they are easy to use too. So, for people aiming for DIY projects, Joomla seems to be a better choice as it is less complicated, and users need to spend small amount of time for mastering the basics.

SEO-friendliness

For many people, this has become an important criterion for selection of the right CMS. Small as well as mid-sized companies spend thousands to get their sites ranked in the top SERPs. So, which one helps you to get their faster, Drupal or Joomla?

Difference: Both Drupal and Joomla provide several SEO-friendly features like creating tags and titles, editing meta-tag descriptions, etc. But, from Drupal’€™s side, users get an additional Clean URLs option. This option enables users to create URLs with better structures. In Joomla, creating URLs is a tough task because the CMS creates several URLs for a single content. So, when it comes to SEO, Drupal seems to have an upper hand.

Responsive design

This is a crucial aspect to consider while selecting CMS. The number of people using mobile devices is increasing each day, and so is the demand of responsive web designing. So where does Joomla and Drupal stand in this aspect?

Difference: Joomla 3.0 comes with support for responsive design, which means Joomla users won’t have to pay extra bucks to make their site supportive for mobile users. In Joomla 3.0, even the admin dashboard is responsive. On the contrary, Drupal still doesn’€™t have a version that supports this feature. It is being said that Drupal 8 would come installed with support for responsive designing, but till then, we’€™ll have to wait. Hence, for responsive web designing, Joomla remains the only choice.

Extensions and support

A good CMS is characterized by extensions and the support provided by it to maintain the extensions. Both Drupal and Joomla provides its users with thousands of extension and good support for the same. Then how do you differentiate?

Difference: Drupal’€™s extensions can be downloaded and used for free as the extensions have GPL. But, the free extensions come with a downside. Support for extensions is usually not available, and even if it does, then it comes for a limited time period. So, when your extension encounters a problem, then you’ll have to find the solutions on your own.

Joomla, on the other hand, has both free as well as commercial extensions. While you may have a tough time to find support for the free ones, support for the commercial ones is always available. If you are ready to find solutions on your own, then you can go for Drupal. But, if you are ready to pay for maintenance, then Joomla is your call.

Scalability

As a website starts receiving visitors, it becomes essential for owners to scale their sites to keep up its performance. Drupal as well as Joomla can increase a site’s scalability, but the ways differ.

Difference: Drupal offers a downloadable plugin known as ‘€˜Pressflow’€™ which performs caching and improves a website’€™s performance. This plugin is integrated with tools which provide testing enhancements along with scalability. But, it has to be installed separately.

Joomla, on the other hand, doesn’t require an external plugin as it by default contains a page caching system known as System Cache Plugin. This system improves the page loading speed of a site. Joomla also provides an extension called lotCache which gives people more control over caching. So, in terms of scalability, both CMS stand on equal grounds.

Wrapping Up

Both Drupal and Joomla open source CMS platforms have their own pros and cons. Apart from the above mentioned points, there are other factors like installation, customization and availability of expertise that influence a person’s decision during CMS selection. But, the decision ultimately narrows down to the anticipated requirements and the capability of a CMS to fulfill those requirements.

The decision also ties down to how well a person can exploit the features of a CMS, and this is only possible by en experienced developer. Hence, whether you select Drupal or Joomla, ensure that you have the right experts by your side because only they can help you to get the best out of the platform.

Written By

Kinjal is working as a digital marketer and blogger with 5 years of experience. She is working with ecommerce development outsourcing company - Cygnet Infotech specialize in building business apps and websites. She is always happy to share her passion for ecommerce and mobile technologies. Follow Kinjal on Twitter @adeshara_kinjal

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Max

    November 30, 2013 at 5:45 pm

    Somewhat misleading comparison. There are many responsive Drupal themes.

  2. Phil Levitt

    December 1, 2013 at 1:59 am

    I agree with Max, a little misleading, but regardless they’re both great CMS’s. I’m personally a big Joomla user, but Drupal has it’s benefits.

  3. Sumber

    December 1, 2013 at 5:58 pm

    Joomla is good, but i like WordPress, because there so many plugin that i can used also easy to modify.

  4. johnabraham

    December 4, 2013 at 7:00 am

    By go through this post, i got some useful information. joomla offers good features and support multiple functionality. lots of benefits by using joomla platform. so i prefer joomla cms.

  5. gaurav

    December 11, 2013 at 5:16 am

    I will prefer drupal bcoz max plugin are free of cost. but in joomla , most of plugin are chargeable and not easy to create custom plugin. In between I like to say wordpress is much more better than these two.

  6. Mani

    December 27, 2013 at 12:46 pm

    I go for Drupal rather than Joomla.But I always prefer WordPress for SEO and designing 🙂

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